


As Uncomplicated As Love

by wehavefound



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Human AU, Mild torture, Some depictions of violence, anti-soulmates au, meaning that this is a world with soulmates and they are not each other's soulmate, soulmates are like imprinting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:47:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29256936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wehavefound/pseuds/wehavefound
Summary: A soulmate is the greatest gift you could ever have, the most important relationship in your life. The bond you shares with them makes the world hurt less, eases the pain of the world. It washes over everything that matters and not everything comes out the other side--but that's okay. Who would want to keep anything but the beauty of their love anyway? Alice is just confused, a lost misguided child. She'll be fixed soon.
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Jessamine Hale
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6
Collections: Jalice Week - February 2021





	As Uncomplicated As Love

**Author's Note:**

> This is not beta'd, sorry yall. Also read with caution, there are some depictions of violence here.

There are treatments for their type. 

Hospitals for the rebellious teens who shy from their fate.

Hospitals too, for those unaffected by such madness until they reach the age of majority, rare as it may be. 

Those are not as kind, for any adult who persists in such delusions must be taught the error of their ways more firmly than a confused child who simply does not understand the beauty of the universe.

This is for their own good after all.

The soulmark will remove any hurt that comes from the reform, will make them understand that this is a kindness they should be thankful for. It’s difficult to watch for the staff, sure, but they have peace in understanding that they are helping these lost misguided children find their way back into the flock. 

To their one love, whose light will bring them joy. Will soothe the memories of their reeducation. 

It is not an easy place to be sent.

That is why Alice is here now, freezing half to death inside an ice bath she cannot escape from. She is tied after all, hands and ankles bound by metal handcuffs that leaves angry red marks upon her skin in the cold. A chain connecting the two lest she attempt to raise her bound arms, to escape the biting cold for even a moment.

Her soulmate has already been located and yet she is stubbornly still on Tier 1. A danger to herself and to her soulmate. Too many escape attempts combined with other attempts.

She can make this end at any point. She can sense the words upon her lips around the disgusting wet gag that does not serve to muffle her, only to bring the taste of old blood into her mouth with the embarrassment and pain of having her jaw pulled open. 

She could do it. Could confess the error of her ways, ask to be brought to the light. It takes time to make her way through the tiers but she has been here so very long anyway. 

If she spends much longer on Tier 1 the punishments will be even harsher. She will slip to the bottom most level, where not all who go return. A tragedy of course but then, the soulmate they left behind is awarded certain privileges to ease the burden of being gifted a Defective for their soulmate. It is rare, yes, but their worldly needs will be provided for and sometimes in such situations, well. It is better than they have never felt a soulmark so they may be content with bonds made with others in their situation.

Better than being killed by one driven to madness, one who will not accept the bond.

People like her. 

Her soulmate does not know she is here yet. She is a normal teenager, one who has accepted her fate with ease. It would pain her to know of her soulmate’s indiscretion before Alice has risen high enough in the tiers to be trusted to fulfill their bond. No use hurting someone who hasn’t earned it after all.

She’s a perfectly ordinary girl only a year older than Alice. Her favorite subject is history and she wants to be a college professor. Alice could meet her, if she could only behave. The bond would active, would bathe her in its beauty and light, would erase this stubborn childish refusal to understand. 

Alice would be at peace. This hurt and anger and longing she feels would be gone. The punishments would end, she would be free to go forth in light and beauty. They say it feels like your past is snipped away from you when you first touch their soulmark. That your cares and worries and fears simply fall away and nothing else matters but them.

They say it’s sacred.

It sounds horrifying.

She wants— She wants anything but that. Wants to choose her own future. Wants to be able to want her own. What must it feel like, to be one with a dead soulmate? To have the world as your domain, to know you may have your selection of anyone else without a soulmate and your love would be considered beautiful for the choice within? 

They are not judged for forging new love. How many movies feature ones who have lost soulmates but made the choice to build a new relationship? It will never be as important or true as a soulmate bond of course, but there is beauty none the less. There is acceptance.

Perhaps her soulmate will consider it a gift when Alice dies here. Not that the girl knows anything of her so-called madness.

Of her stubborn refusal to let go of the girl she loves now, loves authentically not just because fate decided it to be so but because she’s everything Alice has ever wanted. 

Jess is somewhere in the hospital even now. They see each other sometimes, when they are punished side by side. When they are forced to be the one that picks up the stun gun, to be the one that holds the other underwater until the verge of death.

The orderlies say they will erase the good memories together. To make their only thought of each other one of pain and fear and despair. To make the mere thought of the other so repulsive that they embrace the soulmark.

It will work, eventually. Even the strongest spine will snap after long enough. They both know it. And yet neither of them is at that point just yet, neither has fallen so far as to give up on their love. They are teetering right on the brink, so close Alice knows it will be any day now before finally they are.

Jess was the one to put her in this bath. To shackle her with frozen metal straight from the ice box. To slowly pour pitchers of ice and slush onto her until the bathtub’s metal walls burn and her wrists are angry red and she has stopped shivering. 

She cradled her as she did it. Looked into her eyes lovingly even as Alice twitched and thrashed helplessly from the cold. Gripped her short cropped hair in her tight fist as she pulled Alice underwater, gaze locked tight even as the cold washed over her and the cold shock response hit. 

She doesn’t know how long she’s been in here. How long it has been since Jess left. How long she’s been reminiscing. 

She isn’t cold anymore and that’s probably a bad thing. 

She won’t see Jess when she is removed, she knows it already. No positive interactions between the two of them for months now. 

Not since their relationship was discovered.

Not since they were found pressed against each other, lips together.

Jess had shielded her then, had put her own body in front of Alice’s and shouted for her to run. It was only Alice’s fault that she wasn’t fast enough to escape. Only Alice’s fault she hadn’t seen the interruption coming.

It’s an orderly who removes her from the bath, dragging her over the metal lip as though dragging a sack of garbage out to the curb. Her shackles are removed, hair tousled clean as she sits in the warming room. Her soulmate’s face is here, projected on the screens that line the room. They’ve found a video of her laughing—perhaps ordered her to take it—and all Alice can see as the warmth seeps into her bones is the sight of the girl she’s meant to love. 

It’s getting harder to picture Jess in these moments. 

When they first were brought here it was so simple, so easy. The warmth belonged to her lover alone, to the times Jess had cradled her in her arms. To the kisses and cuddles they had shared. To the belonging.

Was this what it felt like to let go?

This was a mind game. A trick designed to break her. Alice knew this. It didn’t make it easier to resist. Not after so many months, not after her lover’s hands touching her only to cause pain.

Tonight, she will see Jess again and this time it will be her hands causing pain. A cattle prod, perhaps. They never had matching punishments. Couldn’t be letting the prisoners see their own pain in each other too easily after all.

It’s easy to imagine how it will feel to hold Jess’s bound body in her arms. To look into her eyes wide with fear and remember the nights they spent together even as she presses the prod into her bruised and tender flesh, even as Jess jerks and writhes on the disgusting floor. As she screams and begs and pleads and Alice can only press the prod deeper into her skin. She’s done it a hundred times over.

Soon they will be authorized to leave scars. Soon it will be a knife she drags though the tender flesh of her bound lover. Sharp on days they’re lucky. Never disinfected. Never cleaned. The infections are the secondary punishment for their crimes.

Jess will break on the third slice of the knife through Alice’s bound legs.

It’s soon, she knows it. Can see her own fragile bruised body stretched out across the restraint blocks, hear the muffled sobs coming from Jess and the decidedly unmuffled screams from her as she writhes. They’re meant to hear the pain they cause each other. As though the feeling of her muscles parting like water beneath the hard metal is not painful enough on its own.

It will be the last time she sees Jess authentically. There will be the taped interview of course, a requirement for any leaving patient. Jess will look directly at the camera and denounce her sins, say how happy she is to be cleansed. To meet her soulmate. Perhaps there will be footage of her hugging her new love tacked onto the end. It would be too cruel to ask a reformed patient to speak to what they left behind after they were cleansed of course, so distance shots of happiness are all Alice will get of her joy.

There will be joy, that she does not doubt. The soulmarks erase as much as they need to for happiness to be found. If it turns her into a completely different person well, she will be happy as whoever that is.

It’s more painful each time she thinks of it.

She’s still surrounded by images of her own soulmate. Still warming slowly enough she doesn’t go into shock. She could accept it first. It would be so easy to accept her fate. To slip into happiness. She could make all of this end so easily, could stop the horrible dancing visions of her lover covered in Alice’s blood screaming, of her love’s jerking flailing limbs as electricity pulses through her.

They say becoming cleansed is the most beautiful feeling in the world, that all her hurt and pain and fears will melt away. Everything that makes her Alice will be gone. 

Most of what makes her Alice is her love for Jess after all, for the tall blonde’s magnetic hypnotism. When she thinks of Jess she will not remember the love the girl sparked, the good times they spent together. She will remember the pain and chuckle to herself about how silly and foolish children are to resist their own love. She’ll share a kiss with her soulmate over their children’s heads and hope they never grow to share the same sentiment.

It’s death in every way that counts.

But it is a death that ensures they are clean and unmarked in their next life, that Jess will carry no cruel twisted scars for her own selfish refusal to accept their fates. There is no way out that does not end in death one way or the other. The system is too powerful, the gears of bureaucracy crushing them beneath them relentless to what they desire.

There is no escape in any way that matters, no agency of their own. No future where she can thread the eye of the needle closely enough for them to find love. Only a choice between clean death or needless waste.

No, those possibilities were lost the moment she allowed her contentment in the moment to blind her to the future. This pain they’re going through is her fault on every level that counts, every level they have the power to affect. 

She has to let go now. Before the warmth leaves her along with her nerve. Before Jess ends up with scars that will haunt her the rest of her life, even with the cleanse. Before their love leaves permanent marks to follow them.

The words are on the tip of her tongue and yet strangely impossible to get out, to bridge that gap.

You don’t meet your soulmate right away once you resign yourself to it of course. Can’t have any attempted homicide. You simply leave the hospital to be evaluated in a halfway house, meeting your new love when it is judged safe for all.

Not that anyone can truly resist cleansing for long but a few moments are all it takes and it would be wretchedly unfair to the innocent party to make their first meeting marred by handcuffs.

It is the kind orderly in the warming chamber, the one who towel dried her hair. She likes to tell Alice little facts about her soulmate, something Alice knew for a fact that theoretically anyone in this position should be doing and yet often ignored by jaded workers.

It’s how she knows that her soulmate’s favorite color is blue, that her history notebooks are always green despite this.

One day she’ll look back on the time spent in this chamber as sweet and laugh about how silly she was to not find such details priceless beyond compare.

For now all she can think is that green will stop being the color of Jess’s eyes as soon as she opens her mouth to admit her acceptance. That blonde will stop making her think of Jess wrapping firm hands round her own and will instead conjure up images of her soulmate’s sister over for a cup of coffee. 

It’s a heavy sort of sadness, all too familiar and yet crushing each time. They have lost so much for each other and it’s not enough. There’s somehow always something more to be taken from them, one more piece of their hearts to be dragged out of their chests and stomped on by low paid workers with dead eyes claiming it will help them in the end.

Jess will suffer more if she doesn’t do this and that thought is the only thing that gives her the strength to draw breath in, sit up straighter in the blanket that surrounds her, and plunge the emotional knife into her own chest.

“Ma’am?” she asks and her voice does not waver for all that she thought it would. “I would like to accept my soulmark. I’m ready to be cleansed.”

She leaves the hospital a day later with nothing but for the clothes on her back and when the doors close for the last time the click of the lock marks the last thought of her she’s ever able to have.

I’m sorry Jess.

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a review and also follow my spop tumblr, catradora-queen even tho this is entirely the wrong fandom for this lol


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